What if data could be harnessed to determine renters\u2019 habits and predict their suitability as tenants?<\/p>\n
According to Jerome Werniuk, director of sales at Naborly Inc., that day is just around the corner. The real estate industry in Canada has been slower to adopt technology than it has south of the border, but things are beginning to change. Naborly, for instance, is in the business of running credit checks for landlords\u2014up to 100 a day\u2014and, in the process, has amassed an impressive database of information that it intends to parse for trends, habits, and ways to make both landlords\u2019 and tenants\u2019 lives easier.<\/p>\n
\u201cCompanies like Naborly that aggregate information about tenant migration will completely change how landlords look at their real estate investments,\u201d said Werniuk. \u201cA good way to look at this is through numbers for three categories: average house price, average rental price, and average income.\u201d<\/p>\n
Studying those categories will reveal housing prices are increasing much faster than rental rates\u2014although they\u2019re going up, too\u2014but, fortunately, Naborly\u2019s in-house team of data scientists go much deeper. By combing through the information Naborly has captured from over 50,000 tenants within its system, most of whom are in the Greater Toronto Area, they will produce reports that reveal the average age of renters in a postal code, their average income, and their average debt-to-income ratio, to decipher how long they\u2019re likely live in any given rental.<\/p>\n
\u201cRight now, nobody knows how many people are living in places and nobody knows how long they typically stay before moving on,\u201d said Werniuk. \u201cLet\u2019s say that Amazon puts a new headquarters in a neighbourhood; there will be a new demographic that would want to live there and that\u2019s exactly the kind of data we\u2019d try to capture. We have all this information about tenants and understand what they\u2019re going to make in a year, whether they have roommates, or live with family or friends. If they have just moved to the city, how many times will they move within that city until they\u2019ve built a network around them?<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen landlords have access to that sort of reporting, they\u2019ll make well-informed decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n